Contents

Overview

Free Vision is an application framework that allows you to design user friendly text mode applications. It is designed to be API-compatible with Borland's Turbo Vision framework.

Free Vision implements a full windowing system, where each window can be updated, moved and operated independently from other windows. It is implemented on top of the video, keyboard and mouse units and Free Vision applications can therefore run on most FPC platforms using the write once, compile anywhere principle.

Other distributions/OSes: Free Vision is included with the FPC source package.

To do list

These items were written on a separate page, last edited May 2008:

getting it fully up to speed and compatible with TV

endianness and 64-bit clean work.

filepaths to ansistring ? TP compat less of a problem nowadays. (copy to separate version if necessary?)

Turbo Vision

The Turbo Vision framework originates from Borland, and was delivered with the later incarnations on the Turbo range of compilers. There were two versions, a C++ one, and a Pascal one. The C++ was open sourced (PD) at some point, the Pascal didn't follow, which prompted FPC to search for an alternative.

This was found in the shape of Free Vision, which (afaik) was a backport of the PD C++ code back to Pascal by Leon de Boer for use in graphics mode. As far as I can remember, Pierre and Peter backported the code back to textmode (coordinate system change that affected a lot of code!), ported missing parts, improved compatibility, and hooked it into the Textmode IDE. Note that the sf.net TVISION page falsely states that FPC uses Pascal sources donated by Borland, however it seems that nobody reacts to mails there.

Turbo Vision codebases

There are currently a handful of Turbo Vision based codebases, all open source ones derived from the C++ version released by Borland.

C++

The C++ version as released by Borland (PD) Unfortunately after all the mergers of Borland, the FTP server it was on is dead.